Originally Posted by Ron Bennett

Correct. For most listeners, it's no biggie. But for those with quality sound systems the difference is definitely noticeable.

And for those who seek to archive their music do better to rip in uncompressed WAV - file size will be about 10X larger than a MP3; these days ~40MB files are no big deal.

Also, for archival purposes, DVDs (writable CDs degrade pretty fast; DVDs are superior in both design and durability) are a better choice than SSDs / USB sticks, which have a rated retention time (google it; few people realize that SSDs lose data over time) of about 10 years tops, and some of the cheap higher density SSDs may retain data for only a few years.

Ron